Did you know that some Walmart orders are delivered by Uber Eats? Spark isn’t the only Walmart delivery app in town!
But it turns out that Walmart orders aren’t always popular with most Uber Eats drivers.
Head over to any Uber Eats driver forum to see some VERY strong reactions:
“Nothing good ever comes from a Walmart order, nothing”
“Walmart orders are the kiss of death”
Drivers complain about long pickup times at Walmart, hauling heavy orders up to third-floor walkups, and customers that never tip.
Not every Uber Eats driver’s idea of a great order
But not all Walmart orders are bad! Read on to learn how they work and how you can evaluate Walmart orders to cherry-pick the best ones.
How driver pay works for Walmart orders
Payouts for Walmart deliveries are similar to other Uber Eats deliveries:
The order request shows an upfront payout estimate with the estimated pay, the store location, the number of drop-offs, the estimated total time of the delivery, and a map of the entire route.
Walmart offers show estimated payout, time, distance, and number of stops
Customer tips left during checkout may be included in the upfront estimate, but Walmart customers don’t tip as frequently for various reasons—see more on the Walmart tipping situation below.
Walmart customers may also be able to tip after the order is complete. Those tips take a day or two to appear in your Uber account.
A good rule of thumb for evaluating Walmart orders is to divide the total payout by the estimated delivery time to see how much your hourly pay will be.
For example, many Uber Eats drivers might accept an offer if it pays $25+ per hour.
How to opt out of Walmart orders
To opt out of Walmart orders, call Uber Eats driver support and ask to be removed from Walmart and shopping orders.
Keep in mind that you will be removed you from all shopping orders if you opt out of Walmart orders.
You will no longer be able to do shop and pay orders, Apple store orders, etc.
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The delivery process
Walmart delivery requests appear in the same way as other delivery requests—as a popup in the driver app. In addition, Walmart orders can also appear in the Opportunities section of the app.
Walmart offers show the estimated payout, Walmart store location, the customer drop-off points, and the estimated total time & mileage for the entire delivery.
After you accept the request, your next step is to navigate to the Walmart location and follow instructions to find the pickup spot.
Wait for a Walmart employee to approach your car, or try to get their attention. Tell them your order information. The Walmart employee will load your vehicle with the order.
After you have all the items, navigate to each customer by following directions in the app to complete the delivery.
Each delivery should contain relevant information like gate codes or drop-off instructions, but you may need to contact the customer for that information.
Examples of good, high-paying Walmart offers
Below is an order with great hourly pay and not too many miles. $66 in 71 minutes works out to over $55 per hour, and $66 for 12 miles of driving is around $5 per mile.
Even if there are some delays along the way, this one should be worth it.
Over $55 per hour!
The driver below scored a Walmart delivery that paid over $72 in an hour and twenty minutes, and 20 miles. That’s over $3.60 per mile. Most drivers aim for around $2 per mile.
$72/20 miles = $3.60 per mile. Thats great.
The order below pays $3.55 per mile and $67 per hour(!). Even with 11 stops and 20–25 bags, most drivers are happy to accept this.
$135 for 2 hours! That’s good.
Examples of bad, low-paying Walmart orders
The order below has tons of red flags. It’s only $30 for an hour and forty minutes of work with seven stops—all covering an area of LA with tons of traffic.
$16 per hour, and this trip will likely take a lot longer in LA traffic
Below is an order with 10 stops—nearly 2 hours—for only $24. Each stop can bring new complications, so 2 hours might be a big underestimate. Definitely a skip.
$24 for 10 stops is bad
Here’s a list of bad orders. $20 for 90 minutes, $25 for 110 minutes. These are listed in the Opportunities area of the app, but not every driver would call them a good ‘Opportunity.’
Most drivers wouldn’t call these “Opportunities”
Tough call: Would you take this?
Sometimes it’s not as apparent when an order is great or terrible. This one got mixed reactions on Reddit, with some drivers saying they’d be happy to do it and some saying they’d ‘rather die.’
Would you take this?
Why some Uber Eats drivers don’t like Walmart deliveries
Low pay for a long route: Some Walmart offers can be laughably bad. Just see the bad Walmart orders on this page: 90 minutes of work with multiple complicated stops at apartment complexes for only $20–$30.
$15 for 2 hours of work and 47 miles of driving
Infrequent tips compared to food delivery: Walmart customers rarely tip. Walmart allows customers to tip on some orders, but not all. And many choose not to tip because there isn’t a strong tipping culture for this type of delivery.
Long pickup times at Walmart location: Walmart employees are supposed to load your car within 5 minutes of your arrival, but issues at the store can extend wait times. Just 10 or 15 extra unpaid minutes and the order is no longer worth doing.
Not enough info about the order you’re doing: You might have to take one small bag, or you might have to haul a trunk full of groceries to the third floor of a maze-like apartment complex.
Heavy lifting: Walmart customers frequently order cases of drinks and other heavy items that you have to haul to their door. A McDonald’s order isn’t going to weigh over 100lbs.
Customers don’t know you’re coming: Walmart customers don’t always know how their order is delivered. Good luck getting a gate code or more drop-off instructions from a customer who doesn’t know you’re coming!
Too many Walmart requests coming in back to back: In some markets with a busy Walmart, you might get back-to-back-to-back Walmart offers that you have to reject. That can harm your acceptance rating when trying to level up your Uber Pro.
How to tell if a Walmart order is worth it
Some Uber Eats drivers might tell you that Walmart orders are never worth it. Others will take one if the price is right. Here’s how to quickly evaluate a Walmart order.
Strong pay per hour & pay per mile: Some drivers prefer looking at orders in terms of pay per hour or pay per mile. Crunch the numbers and see if the Walmart order stacks up to a few good food deliveries. Many drivers try to target $2 per mile or higher.
Which Walmart store? Skip the slow ones: After doing a few Walmart orders, you’ll start to see which stores are on top of it and which aren’t. If one store regularly makes you wait longer than 5 minutes to pick up the order, don’t accept any more orders from that store.
Take ‘package’ orders instead of ‘grocery’ orders: Package and grocery are currently the two types of Walmart orders. Package orders are similar to an Amazon delivery, typically just an item or two. Grocery orders usually contain multiple bags, cases of water, etc.
Can customers tip on Walmart orders?
Customers have the option to tip on some Walmart orders, but not necessarily all of them. It depends on the type of order.
Orders with the ‘store delivery‘ label have a tipping section, but ‘shipping‘ orders don’t.
“I’ve done probably 30 or so Walmart orders [on Uber Eats], none of which I’ve been tipped for.”
Is Uber ‘stealing’ tips from drivers?
Tipping is so infrequent on Walmart orders that some drivers believe that Uber or Walmart may be stealing or hiding their tips somehow.
Currently, there’s no evidence to support the idea that Uber and Walmart are skimming driver tips.
The more likely explanation is that Walmart customers are simply tipping less often because tips aren’t usually expected for this type of delivery.
The checkout process for Walmart may allow tipping on some types of orders, but it doesn’t encourage it as heavily as an Uber Eats food delivery.
Tip settlements also take longer for Walmart orders, so you may not see a tip until the next day or so.
Customers may not know that Uber Eats is delivering their Walmart order
One issue with Walmart orders on Uber Eats is that customers typically don’t know that their order is coming via Uber Eats.
Most customers expect FedEx or USPS to deliver their order, so they might be surprised to see an Uber driver drop it off instead.
When a customer isn’t expecting you, drop-off problems are way more common. Customers are less likely to help you with issues like gate codes when they aren’t expecting you.
One Walmart customer said, “Nowhere does it even hint at the fact it is being outsourced to DoorDash or Uber Eats.”
More quotes from drivers about Walmart orders
“For me, it’s never been worth it. There are NO tips”
“Walmart orders consist of 3-5 40-packs of water going up to a second or third floor apartment”
“They are hit or miss where I am. Sometimes they’re good”
“it’s a crap shoot on what you’re getting could be 1 item or a car load of groceries”
“I dont see how drivers are waiting 20 mins or longer to pick up 8 dollar 5 mile orders? ”
“Nothing good ever comes from a Walmart order, nothing”
“My walmart orders were a goldmine tonight”
“My first time doing a Walmart delivery I literally cried”
Adam Resseguie says
I have done maybe a hundred and fifty Uber Walmart deliveries. And there have been odd discrepancies that I was beginning to pick up one based on conversations with customers. So I finally worked up the guts to just have the conversations with the customers. And discovered that several of my customers were surprised to discover that I did not receive the tip they included when placing the original Walmart order. I have now shown my phone and the breakdown of the order costs to several customers after inquiring whether or not they had included a tip when originally placing the Walmart order. It turns out that Walmart is regularly skimming the tips. In many cases more than half. The last incident was a $9 payment including tip for a delivery of groceries from walmart. The customer asked me you got the tip in the app right? I said I’ll find out as soon as I close out the order. I did so brought the order breakdown up and I had received $4 for the tip. The customer was irate. Having tipped $14. This emboldened me to repeat this conversation with several other customers. Many of them did not tip, but in almost every instance where the tip was in excess of $5, I as the driver never saw it. Two of my main customers that I delivered to regularly now tip me in cash for that reason. I have only just begun to understand how much they really are skimming. This is not an imagined issue. And I as a little guy I am eagerly watching for someone stronger than me to be as equally upset so that I may throw in with them. If you still deliver then I encourage you to look into this yourself. If we were able to communicate with customers after closing out the order I would begin sending a copy of Uber’s financial breakdown to every customer as I am pulling out of the driveway.
EL says
I live about 2 miles from a Walmart so I, unfortunately get a lot of these BS requests that literally leave you working for less than$5.00 an hour figuring in gas etc. It wasn’t like this when Walmart started to use UberEats. It all changed with Walmarts program to rival Amazon Prime. After over 71/2 years of Uber my acceptance rate has fallen from 97% to 67%.
Another sore point…. On September 15,2019, Uber went to tipping mode as our primary source of revenue delivering with UberEats. Yet we are punished by decreasing acceptance rates if we refuse to deliver to non-tipping customers ( who are actually rewarded by getting the same food service we give to tipping customers. The CEO of Uber is a terrible leader and is only worried about his bonuses and such and doesn’t give one shit about the drivers.
Sandy says
Walmart grocery orders can be good but lately waits of over an hour are common.The system is seriously flawed!
Doug H says
Yep, the wait time is the biggest profit killer on these